Letter: Egypt unrest a reason to dump foreign oil

Editor: Egypt has been in the news of late due to massive demonstrations throughout the country, the throngs wanting the ouster of Egyptian President Hanai Mubarak.

Our State Department's line has been their concern for the promotion of democracy in Egypt, a predominately Muslim country. I personally find this hard to believe given the stance the Obama Administration took regarding the freedom demonstrators in Iran. Oil has always been a concern in the Middle East especially Egypt's control of the Suez Canal, where a good deal of the world's supply of oil flows though pipelines and aboard tanker ships.

What a perfect opportunity for the United States to start moving away from our dependency on foreign sources of oil. Didn't we try to do just that some 40 years ago with the creation of the Department of Energy? We now have a bloated bureaucracy that has done little if anything to solve the problem for which it was created. President Barack Obama halted off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while giving billions of taxpayer dollars to Mexico and Brazil to drill in the Gulf. Numerous countries, Russia, India and Cuba will be drilling for oil in the Gulf just a few miles off our shores while tens of thousands of U.S. workers are unemployed due to Obama's moratorium on U.S. drilling in the Gulf. The U.S. need not drill at all in the Gulf when there is a vast abundance of oil in a variety of areas throughout the continental U.S.

Why don't we say so long to foreign sources of oil especially from the Middle East, a hot bed of unrest?

There are any number of excuses why the United States can't acquire its own sources of energy. One of the biggest impediments is the powerful left-leaning, looney lobbyists who are far more concerned with the preservation of bugs, birds and assorted animals than the survival of the human inhabitants of this country.